Luna Priestess

Lyra's POV  All I could see was fire. It crawled up the walls like a living thing, curling around the beams with a suffocating heat. Under the roar of the flames, I could hear them...screaming. Not human screams, not wolf howls, but something jagged and inhuman in between. I was running. My bare feet slapped against white marble that had turned into a searing griddle. Every door I passed was already a furnace, the wood curling and blackening. Find her, a voice hissed. It wasn’t a sound in the air; it was a vibration in my skull, where the Goddess liked to dwell, uninvited and demanding. Find her before the fire does. I didn’t know who “her” was. I only knew that if I didn’t run faster, I was going to watch someone burn alive. The hallway suddenly buckled, bending into a room filled with endless mirrors. In every reflection, there was a different version of me. Me in Temple white, pure and untouched. Me in blood red, drenched in s*******r. And then… me in nothing at all. I watched myself tangled in silk sheets, pinned beneath a man whose face shifted every time I blinked. A blur of desire and danger. Gold eyes. Then black. Then gold again. I reached out to touch the reflection, to touch the heat of him, but he grabbed my wrist first. “Lyra.” I gasped, my body jerking back. My pencil skidded violently across the page, leaving an ugly, jagged black scar across the parchment. “You’re doing it again.” Rhys was crouching in front of me, his expression a cocktail of amusement and genuine worry. “Eyes open, nobody home. You scared the acolytes half to death, Ly.” I looked down. I’d been sketching without even knowing it. It happened sometimes...when the Sight came in too strong to stay locked in my head, it leaked out through my fingertips. Burning halls. A silhouette of a woman. And in the corner, half-drawn, a man’s jaw. The line of his throat. I realised, with a sudden heat in my chest, that I’d put more care into that jaw than I remembered putting into anything in my entire life. I didn’t recognise him. That should have been my first warning. “That’s new,” Rhys murmured, tilting his head at the page as if the drawing might bite him. “Since when do your visions have cheekbones like that?” “Since never,” I snapped, slamming the sketchbook shut before he could get a closer look. “Pre-summit nerves, probably.” “Pre-summit nerves don’t usually come with a house fire and a hot stranger, Ly.” “Shut up.” He grinned, and something in my chest loosened. Rhys was the only normal thing in my world. We had grown up in the same drafty dorm room, two Temple orphans nobody claimed, learning prophecy and how to fold linen with the same clumsy hands. If the Goddess ever gave me one mercy, it was him. But mercy ended today. Today, I stopped being a novice. Today, in front of the entire Coastal Court, I would kneel at the altar and be crowned High Priestess. I was a freak of nature...the only wolf in five packs whose gift was never clouded by the hunger of wanting. No lust, no longing. Just the Sight. I’d spent nineteen years training to be untouchable. To be a void. I was about to find out how well that void held up. The hall was already suffocating by the time Elder Maren walked me down the aisle. My white robes dragged over stone that had been soaked in the incense and blood of generations of Priestesses. Every Alpha of the Coastal Court was there. Betas. Mates. The air was thick with the scent of musk, power, and anticipation. They were all dressed in their finest, waiting to see who would walk out of this summit as the Supreme Alpha. I kept my eyes down. I had been trained to be a ghost. You don’t look a wolf in the eye...not unless you want to challenge them or invite them into your bed. It didn’t matter that I was supposed to be exempt from that rule now. Old habits were the only things that felt safe. “Chin up,” Maren whispered, her voice a sharp command. “You’re not hiding in a corner anymore. You are the Sight of this Court. Let them see the power they’re relying on.” So, I lifted my chin. Mistake number one. The doors at the end of the hall swung open, and the entire atmospheric pressure of the room shifted. It was that ripple of primal fear you feel when the most dangerous predator in the building enters the room. I looked up, and I collided with a pair of gold eyes. Alpha Kaius Draven. I felt it before I understood it. My stomach dropped like a missed stair, a sudden, violent plunge into vertigo. My heart did something it had never done around another wolf. Not once. Not in nineteen years of being told my body simply didn’t function that way. He was towering, a silhouette that forced the entire room to rearrange itself around him. Dark hair, a jaw sharp enough to cut glass, and a presence that felt like a physical weight against my skin. He wasn’t smiling. While every other man in the hall looked at the crown with greed, Kaius looked like he’d rather be anywhere else. He looked bored. He looked lethal. And somehow, that made it worse. Because I knew him. Gold eyes. That jaw. That throat. He was the stranger from my sketchbook. The vision hit me before I could brace for the impact. Maren’s voice dissolved into static. The scent of incense thickened, morphing into the acrid smell of burning wood. That same voice hissed in my ear: Find her before the fire does. And then… nothing. No fire. No smoke. Not the future or the past. Absolute black. In nineteen years of training, I had never once lost the Sight. Not during fevers, not in sleep, not even in the depths of illness. There was always a thread, a candle left burning in a distant room of my mind. Now, the candle had been snuffed out. I must have swayed, because Maren’s hand caught my elbow, her grip bruising. “Lyra.” The ceremony had vanished from her voice, replaced by raw panic. “Look at me.” I couldn’t. I was paralyzed, staring across the hall at him. At Kaius Draven, whose eyes hadn’t moved off me. His face had shifted from boredom to something sharper. Something almost alarmed. It was the look of a man who had just felt a leash snap. Around us, the murmurs began. Low, curious, and hungry. The kind of murmur that moves through a room of wolves faster than words, because half of them didn’t need words. They could smell it. The scent of a connection. The scent of something forbidden happening between the Priestess and the Alpha, right there in the open. “Elder Maren.” My voice cracked, a jagged sound that should have been impossible for a High Priestess. “I can’t see anything.” Her fingers dug into my arm. “Say that again,” she breathed, her voice barely a whisper. “Quietly. Say it where no one else can hear you.” But it was already too late for quiet. Kaius Draven was crossing the hall toward us. He didn’t walk; he stalked, cutting through five packs’ worth of Alphas and mates as if they were mere furniture. His gold eyes were locked on mine, predatory and possessive. And I understood, with a cold, sinking feeling in my gut, that whatever the Goddess had just stolen from me, she had taken the moment I looked at him. And she wasn’t giving it back.